A Ticket to the Boneyard (8 page)

“That’s pretty thin. That was what, twelve years ago?”

“About that.”

“And all she did was give the police a statement?”

“Another woman did the same thing, and he made the same threat. Yesterday she got this in the mail.” I handed him the clipping. Actually it was the copy I’d received, but I couldn’t see that it made any difference.

“Oh, sure,” he said. “This ran in the
Evening-Register
.”

“It came all by itself in an envelope with no return address. And it was postmarked New York.”

“Postmarked New York. Not back-stamped by the New York office, but marked to indicate it had been mailed there.”

“That’s right.”

He took his time digesting this. “Well, I see why you thought it was worth getting on a plane,” he said, “but I still don’t see how your Mr. Motley could have been responsible for what happened in Walnut Hills the other night. Unless he was sending out hypnotic radio broadcasts and Phil Sturdevant was picking them up on the fillings in his teeth.”

“It’s that open-and-shut?”

“It sure as hell looks to be. You want to have a look at the murder scene?”

“Could I do that?”

“I don’t see why not. We’ve got a key to the house somewhere. Let me get it and I’ll take you over there and walk you through it.”

The Sturdevant house was at the end of a cul-de-sac in a development consisting of expensive houses on lots of a half-acre or more. It was a one-story structure with a pitched roof and a fieldstone-and-redwood exterior. The property was nicely landscaped with evergreens, and there was a stand of birch trees near the property line.

Havlicek parked in the driveway and opened the front door with his key. We walked through an entrance hall into a large living room with a beamed cathedral ceiling. A fireplace ran the length of the far wall. It looked to be built of the same stone used for the house’s exterior.

A gray broadloom carpet had been laid wall-to-wall in the living room, and there were some oriental area rugs laid here and there on top of it. One of these stretched in front of the fireplace. A chalk outline of a human being had been traced on the rug, with part of the legs extending onto the broadloom.

“That’s where we found him,” Havlicek said. “Way we reconstruct it, he hung up the phone and came over to the fireplace. You see the gun rack. He kept a deer rifle and a .22 there, along with the twelve-gauge he used to kill himself. Of course we took both rifles along for safekeeping, in addition to the twelve-gauge. He would have been standing right there, and he’d have put the shotgun barrel in his mouth and triggered the weapon, and you can see the mess it made, blood and bone fragments and all. That’s been cleaned up some, just for purposes of sanitation, but there’s photographs on file if you need to see them.”

“And that’s where he fell. He landed face up?”

“That’s right. The gun was lying alongside him, about where you’d expect to find it. Place has a charnel-house stink to it, doesn’t it? Come on, I’ll show you where we found the others.”

The children had been murdered in their beds. They’d each had a room of their own, and in each room I got to look at blood-soaked bedding and another chalk outline, one smaller than the next. The same kitchen knife had been used on all three children and their mother, and it had been found in the bathroom off the master bedroom. In the bedroom itself they’d found the corpse of Connie Sturdevant. Bloody bedclothing indicated she’d been killed in bed, but the chalk outline was on the floor at the foot of the bed.

“We figure he killed her on the bed,” Havlicek said, “and then threw her down on the floor. She was wearing a nightgown, so she’d evidently gone to sleep, or at least to bed.”

“How was Sturdevant dressed?”

“Pajamas.”

“Slippers on his feet?”

“Barefoot, I think. We can look at the photos. Why?”

“Just trying to get the picture. What phone did he use to call you people?”

“I don’t know. There’s extensions all over the house, and whatever one he used he hung it up afterward.”

“Did you find bloody fingerprints on any of the phones?”

“No.”

“He have blood on his hands?”

“Sturdevant? He had blood all over him, for God’s sake. He blew the better part of his head all over his living room. You tend to lose a fair amount of blood that way.”

“I know. Was all of it his?”

“What are you getting at? Oh, wait a minute, I can see where you’re heading. You’re saying he’d have had their blood on him.”

“They seem to have done a lot of bleeding. You’d think he’d have got some of it on him.”

“There was blood in the bathroom sink, where he must have washed his hands. As to whether he got blood on himself that he couldn’t wash off, on his pajamas, say, well, I don’t know. I don’t even know if you could tell their blood apart. They could all have the same type, for all I know.”

“There are other tests these days.”

He nodded. “DNA matchups and that sort of thing. I know about that, of course, but an all-out forensic workup didn’t appear indicated. I guess I see your point. If the only blood on him was his own, how did he manage to kill them without getting his hands dirty? Except he did get ’em dirty, we found where he tried washing up.”

“Then there would have to be foreign bloodstains on his person.”

“Foreign meaning not his. Why? Oh, because we know he had blood on him to wash off, and you never get all of it. So if there’s none of their blood on his hands or his clothing, and if we do find traces of their blood in the bathroom sink, then somebody else killed them.” He frowned and thought about it. “If there had been a single false note at the crime scene,” he said. “If we had had the slightest reason to suspect this was anything other than what it looked to be, why, we might have taken a longer look at the physical evidence. But for God’s sake, man, he called us up and told us what he’d done. We sent a car out and found him dead. When you’ve got a confession and the killer dead by his own hand, it tends to put a damper on further inquiry.”

“I understand that,” I said.

“And I haven’t seen anything here today to change my mind. You saw the padlock on the front door. We put that on after, on account of we had to force the door when we got here. He had it locked with the chain on, the way you’ll do when you’re settled in for the night.”

“The killer could have gone out another door.”

“The back door was locked the same way, bolted from inside.”

“He could have used a window and closed it after him. It wouldn’t have been that hard to do. Sturdevant would already have been dead when the killer made the phone call. Do you automatically record calls to headquarters?”

“No. We log ’em, but we don’t tape ’em. Is that how they do it in New York?”

“There’s a tape made of calls to 911.”

“Then it’s a shame he didn’t do this in New York,” he said, “so there’d be a record, same as your medical examiner could tell us what everybody had for breakfast. But I’m afraid we’re a little backward here.”

“I didn’t say that.”

He thought a moment. “No,” he said. “I guess you didn’t.”

“They don’t record calls into the individual precincts in New York, or at least they didn’t when I was on the job. And they only started taping the 911 calls when it turned out that the operators were incompetent and kept screwing up. I’m not trying to play City Mouse, Country Mouse with you, Lieutenant. I don’t think we’d have looked any harder at this case than you people did. As a matter of fact, the biggest difference between the way you’ve handled it and the way they’d have done it in New York is that you’ve been very decent and cooperative with me. If a cop or ex-cop from out of town came to New York with the same story, he’d get a lot of doors shut in his face.”

He didn’t say anything just then. Back in the living room he said, “I can see where it might not be a bad idea to tape incoming calls. Shouldn’t be all that costly to set up, either. What would it do for us in this instance? You’re thinking voiceprint, but for that you’d need a recording of Sturdevant’s voice for comparison purposes.”

“Did he have an answering machine? He might have taped a message.”

“I don’t think so. Those machines aren’t all that popular around here. Of course there might be some record of his voice somewhere. Home video, that sort of thing. I don’t know if something like that would work for voiceprint comparison, though I don’t see why not.”

“If you had the call taped,” I said, “you could find out one thing easily enough. You could find out if it was Motley.”

“Well, you could at that,” he said. “I never even thought of that, but when you’ve got an actual suspect it makes a difference, doesn’t it? If you had a call taped and the voiceprint matched your Mr. Motley, you’d pretty much have him hanged, wouldn’t you?”

“Not until we get a new governor.”

“Oh, that’s right. Your man keeps vetoing the death-penalty bills, doesn’t he? But in a manner of speaking, you’d have your killer cold.” He shook his head. “Speaking of voiceprints, you can probably guess we didn’t do any dusting for fingerprints.”

“Why should you? It looked open-and-shut.”

“We do a lot of things routinely when there’s not much point to them. Shame we didn’t do that.”

“I’ve a feeling Motley didn’t leave any fingerprints.”

“Still, it would be nice to know. I could get a crew in here now, but there’ve been so many people through here by this time I don’t think we’d have much luck. Besides, it’d mean reopening the case, and I have to say you haven’t given me cause to do that.” He hooked his thumbs in his belt and looked at me. “You honestly think he did it?”

“Yes.”

“Can you point to any kind of corroborating evidence? A clipping in the mail and a New York postmark, that may be enough to get you thinking, but it doesn’t do a lot to change how the case looks from here.”

I thought about that one while we left the house. Havlicek drew the door shut and snapped the padlock. It was cooler now, and the birch trees cast long shadows across the lawn. I asked when the killings had taken place. Wednesday night, he said.

“So it’s been a week.”

“Will be in a matter of hours. The call came in around midnight. I could give you the time to the minute, if it matters, because as I said we keep a log.”

“I just wondered about the date,” I said. “There was no indication on the clipping. I suppose the story would have run in Thursday night’s paper.”

“That’s right, and there were follow-up stories the next day or two, but they won’t tell you anything. Nothing else came to light, so there wasn’t much for them to write about. Just that people were surprised, no indication he was under that kind of stress. The usual things you get from friends and neighbors.”

“What kind of a workup did your medical examiner do?”

“The chief of pathology over at the hospital does our medical exams. I don’t think he did much beyond looking at the bodies and confirming that the wounds were consistent with the way we read the case. Why?”

“You still have the bodies on hand?”

“I don’t believe they’ve been released yet. I don’t know that we’re clear on who we’re supposed to release them to, far as that goes. You got something specific in mind?”

“I was wondering if he’d happened to check for semen.”

“Jesus God. You think he raped her?”

“It’s possible.”

“No signs of a struggle.”

“Well, he’s very strong, and she might not have tried to fight him off. You were asking about corroborative evidence. If there were semen traces, and if the lab work established the semen didn’t come from Sturdevant—”

“That’d be corroboration, wouldn’t it? You might even wind up matching the semen to your suspect. I’ll tell you, I’m not even going to apologize for not ordering a check for pecker tracks. That’s about the last thing that would have occurred to me.”

“If you’ve still got the bodies—”

“We can get him to run tests now. I was already thinking that. I don’t guess she happened to douche in the past few days, do you?”

“I wouldn’t think so.”

“Well, let’s find out,” he said. “Let’s see if we can catch the doc before he goes home for dinner. God, his line of work’s got to be hell on a man’s appetite. Police work’s bad enough. Though I seem to manage, don’t I?” He clapped a hand to his gut and flashed a rueful grin. “Let’s go,” he said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

The pathologist had left for the day. “He’ll be in eight o’clock tomorrow morning,” Havlicek said. “You did say you were staying over, didn’t you, Matt?”

We were Matt and Tom now. I said I was booked on a late-afternoon flight the following day.

“The Great Western’s the best place to stay,” he said. “It’s east of town on Lincoln Way. If you like Italian food you can’t go wrong at Padula’s, that’s right at First Street, or there’s a restaurant at the motel that’s not bad. Or here’s a better idea, let me call my wife and see if she can’t set an extra place at the table.”

“That’s decent of you,” I said, “but I think I’m going to beg off. I had about two hours’ sleep last night and I’m afraid I might fall asleep at the table. Suppose you let me take you to lunch tomorrow?”

“We’ll have to argue about who takes who, but it’s a date. You want to meet me first thing in the morning and we’ll go see the doc? Is eight o’clock too early for you?”

“Eight o’clock is fine,” I said.

I got my car from the lot where I’d left it and found my way to the motel he’d recommended. I got a room on the second floor and took a shower, then watched the news on CNN. They had cable reception and pulled in thirty channels. After the newscast I worked the dial and found a prizefight on some cable channel I’d never heard of. A pair of Hispanic welterweights were spending most of their time in clinches. I watched until I realized that I wasn’t paying any attention to what I was seeing. I went to the restaurant and had a veal chop and a baked potato and coffee and went back to the room.

I called Elaine. Her machine answered, and when I identified myself she picked up and turned the machine off. She was doing fine, she said, sitting behind her barricades and waiting. So far there’d been no untoward phone calls and nothing unlikely in the day’s mail. I told her what I’d done, and that I’d be seeing the pathologist in the morning, that I’d ask him to look for semen traces.